An afternoon view over a Casablanca district, photographed from the 7th floor of Technopark Casablanca on Boulevard Dammam - the building that has, since the early 2000s, served as Morocco’s flagship incubator for technology and startup companies. The middle distance is anchored by a single-pylon cable-stayed bridge spanning a multi-lane boulevard - the diagonal cables fan out from a tall white mast and form one of the strongest geometric elements in the frame. Below the bridge, traffic stacks up along the wide road, and the boulevards radiating away from it are lined with rows of palm trees, which is what gives the picture most of its sense of place: it could really only be a North African city.

The two halves of the foreground tell slightly different stories about the neighbourhood. On the left, low white residential blocks cluster together, the kind of two- and three-storey buildings with flat roofs that fill so much of greater Casablanca. On the right, larger commercial buildings and a billboard hint at a more business-oriented stretch of the same district. Right at the bottom of the frame you can see a rooftop terrace and a small empty plaza in salmon-pink concrete, and if you look carefully there’s a faint reflection of the room I was standing in - the photo was taken through a closed window of the Technopark tower.

The sky was doing most of the work. A field of cumulus clouds spread across a strong blue ground, with enough gaps for the light to land cleanly on the white walls and the bridge cables. I’m more drawn to this kind of mixed urban view - infrastructure, mid-rise housing, palm trees, a working road network - than to the postcard skyline of the Atlantic coast. As someone who has spent most of a career building backend systems for clients in Morocco and Europe, this is the version of Casablanca I see most often, and Technopark is exactly the kind of address where most of that work actually gets done.